Remove Proudly Powered by WordPress Footer in 2017

The most common question ever asked on the WordPress forums is on the topic to remove Proudly Powered by WordPress in twenty seventeen so we dedicate a separate post to address this issue.

In this article, we will discuss how to remove footer credits from any WordPress theme including twenty seventeen.

There are two different ways to hide or remove credits completely from any theme you use or update them with your own copyright notice or other information. The first one is hiding WordPress footer CSS method and the other one is by editing theme file footer.php

Always look into your theme options first to check if updating footer text option is available or not.

You will find it in Appearance > Customize

Woopoo's Tip

Let’s see how we can do it using css. Before going into any details, just to let you know there is a debate on using this method as we will use a css property display: none.

The same property could also be used for black hat SEO techniques and is fairly common. They used this property to hide large amounts of text to trick search engines like Google.

Using this technique to hide only one url is pretty safe and can be implemented as far as you are not going to hide a big chunk of data which will signals Google. More info here

That being said, We first find the div html tag which is encapsulating the credits text and it’s associated css class. We will override this class to hide the credits text. The theme we are using is twenty seventeen but same technique could be applied to any theme.

Here is a step-by-step guide:

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If you are using Google Chrome or Firefox, right click on footer text and from the menu, click Inspect.

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Don’t get panic watching so much code. It’s easy if you follow along. You can see the immediate div and the class is site-info. What’s important for us here is this class name site-info. Make a note and write it down.

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Now from dashboard, go to Appearance > Customize > Additional CSS

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Add the following css code to hide footer text. Click Save and Publish to save the results. You are done.

.site-info { display: none; }

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Note we just add a dot before our class name so you have to do the same if your div class name is other than site-info

You have successfully hide the text but the link is still there. Search engines can find and follow it, only human visitors will not be able to see it.

What if you want to totally remove WordPress footer credits or how about changing it to your own footer copyright text. We will edit theme core files now to remove the text.

It’s always a good idea to backup WordPress theme files before editing any of the files directly.

Woopoo's Caution

In our case, we are using twenty seventeen theme but the same steps could be applied to any theme you are using. Let’s roll the ball.

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From your dashboard, go to Appearance > Editor. This is the place where you can edit WordPress theme files. All your files resides here.

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The file of our interest is footer.php. Click the file and have a look at it.

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Try to locate the credits text you want to replace in the code editor. If you find the text inside all that footer.php code, just replace and click Update File.

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In our case, twenty seventeen theme, the text Proudly Powered by WordPress is not there. Now what can we do?

The first option is to delete the code highlighted below. Don’t forget to click the Update File button every time you make any changes. That’s it. Footer has already been gone.

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If you are feeling a bit more curious, second option is to find the php file manually which hosts the text Proudly Powered by WordPress.

You can also download twenty seventeen theme from WordPress Theme Directory. We are just downloading it for the sake of searching for the footer credits.

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Use a text finder to search for the required text. TextCrawler Pro is the one we use as it has the ability to search text inside files.

In Start Location, locate your theme path you downloaded. In the Find, write Proudly so it will search all the text files for the word Proudly. Click Find. It will list all the files which have the text Proudly in them.

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So the file responsible showing the credits text is site-info.php resides in templates-parts > footer directory.

Additional Readings

Conclusion:

We have tried to cover each step to easily remove Proudly Powered by WordPress footer credits but still if you are facing any problems, do let us know using the comments section below and we will love to answer.

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7 Comments

Massi on January 5, 2018 at 3:25 am

Hi dear, Thank you for this great information. I did that on additional CSS as it shows on first photo and it worked. Just wondering do you know how should I display my own copywrite notice there? my mean like this : copywrite 2018 blah blah blah…

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